I was recently just messing around designing an NPC mage trapped into a cyberzombie body when a thought occured to me.

Since the mage is trapped in the cyberzombies body and is still capable of doing magic can he still channel spirits? If so would the physical attribute boost and immunity when channeling great form spirits still apply?

Now heres an interesting thought. Wince the spirit is basically posessing the cyberzombie would it have to make the same escape test as the magican? What if it fails? Would you have the attribute boost for good or not?

Uh, how is he "trapped" in the body?

He tried to posess the cyberzombie. Ill have to look it up but im pretty sure if a magican tries to posess a cyberzombie he has to make a test to escape and if he fails he is trapped int he cyberzombies body for good.

Spoilers for a Shadowrun novel.

The Abstruse One

M&M page 57 has a section on what happens when something possesses a cyberzombie. The rules apply to both astrally projecting and spirit possessors.

Being trapped is entirely possible.

Its been awhile since i read the rules for cyberzombies in M&M and itll be awhile longer since i no longer have access to that book but as i understoof it the mage didnt lose essence while trapped in the cuberzombie body. Hmm yes a free spirit would work well for this situation.

Could a mage channel spirits while posessiong a cyber zombie?

That could eventually get pretty twinky... Not to meantion schizoprhenia inducing.

Its an idea for NPC's only maybe a run idea to send charactrs to blow up the research facility im not exactly sure but its an interesting thought. My GM had an interesting solution to PC's posessing cyberzombies. The mages that performed the sevice would no doubt expell and destroy the mages aura when he comes back for his cyberzombie cocktale to keep from dying

Okay, I am so making a new cyberzombie with a hermetic mage trapped inside him... The way I see it, the mage gets desperate after a few hours and started calling spirits to bail him out, but they got trapped too, and now they're all going insane from the karma hazing. The mage loses his grip on the poor cyberzombie's mind, and now he's got a mental audience for everything he does... Man, this guy's gonna be fun as all hell!

Whats great is that if he starts channeling spirits and they get trapped you have perminant arrtibute boosts and immunity to normal weapons. Yea the more i think about it the better this starts to sound.

Hmmm... My runners are all still pretty weak suckers, so I guess I'd better give them *some* kind of chance...

Hmmm... Maybe if the various spirits/mage/cyber-zombie all vie for control of the body...

Trapped or not, you're still considered to be in your astral form. Possession only makes you dual-natured and able to affect the physical world, but that's about it. Since you can't use summoning while astral, it won't work.

Not sure what's up with your fascination for "attribute boosts" though. Considering your meat body dies and you're not stuck on the constantly diminishing health of your new host, life isn't exactly going to be peachy for the couple of months, max, you have to live.

I was thinking of it more as a vehicle for an insane, magically-powered cyberzombie...

True but then again this isnt for PC's its beginning to form into a run idea possibly for an online game Im not exactly sure ill have to think about it.

woah um:

That's another point. All Drain would be physical, too.

Thats also a novel and lethe was the specter of a dragon. Another thing all those novels were writen in the 2nd ED so their not exactly cannon

The bit about Physical Drain is canonical. Has nothing to do with the god-forsaken novels. A projecting mage -- even one using Possession -- still has to deal with Physical Drain on all of their spells and, I'm not 100% sure on this point, I think they still only get to use Willpower for it unless the Force exceeds their Magic Attribute. But if so, that high Body score the 'zombie likely has won't be of any help. Not that any of the Body boosting 'ware would help to begin with, mind you.

I know that spell darin is physical ont he astral i meant the part abotut the spirit only being able to cast low force spells. And A mage posessing a cyberzombie is pretty fragging scary because not only are they extremely hard to kill int he physical they can also cast spells and the like.

Actually, they're worse off. Their skills (which the possessor doesn't gain) are those of the mage, so it's doubtful if he knows how to use that BFG his new body is toting around... at least to the level the 'zombie originally was. Likewise for all his other skills.

Magically, he's suffering in a major way. Every spell he casts that he doesn't fully remove all drain from wounds him just as if he were shot. He produces a background count that increases all of his own TNs. Even better, since all of the drain is affecting his astral form only, even implants like a Trauma Damper or even a Guardian Angel have no effect in lowering it.

Best of all, *all* of his TNs suffer a +2 penalty as the 'zombie keeps trying to take back control, and he's suffering all the pains that come from being dual-natured to boot.

So yeah, whoop-ti-do, he has a bunch of cyberware and attribute boosts. But he's now a horrible sammy and a horrible mage. This assumes, of course, that the mage wins the Opposed Willpower Test when he gets trapped (while likely, it's not guaranteed, especially since he suffers a +2 penalty).

I'd much rather face something like that than a regular mage or a regular 'zombie any day of the week.

Well, the clever way to do it is to have a cyberzombie with a latent, repressed possessor who has failed his rolls to take control. The CZ is just as good as he always was, but if he ever gets knocked out, well, he gets to just wake right the fuck up under new management. He also takes seperate damage from mana-based spells, making the CZ pretty goddamn resilient when it comes to that.

What happens if the mage gets disrupted? Does he or she escape the CZ?

Nah. M&M covers the few acceptable ways to escape (which supercedes the ways found in MITS), and they do not include disruption.

besides, it's not like it takes any skill to use suppressive fire. if you've got the right BFG (say, an HVHMG), you just wave it around and splatter your targets by virtue of your high Str (lots of dice) and the insane amount of smackdown your gun lays out. by the rules, you don't even take TN mods for defaulting. not to mention, with mage mental stats and CZ physical stats, your CP is going to be through the roof.

Eh? Suppressive Fire still relies fully on the character's Ranged Combat Attack test, and the defaulting modifiers are wholly independant of ranged combat modifiers. Plus he's not even allowed to use his Combat Pool while doing so. He's looking at a minimal TN modifier of +8 (+2 suppressive fire, +2 for everything, +4 for defaulting to an attribute) with Strength dice and his groovy new smartlink won't be of any use to him while doing so, either. If there's any cover or wound modifiers, he doesn't even get to roll since the TN before defaulting modifiers would be 8 or higher.

No, it was just assumed because, again, defaulting modifiers are wholly independant of ranged combat modifiers, and they were only talking about ranged combat modifiers in said text. The authors just have a tendency to trust in the common sense of the players instead of spelling everything out in detail.

By mcb's logic, the possessed cyberzombie doesn't suffer his usual +2 TN modifier, either, even though it has nothing to do with his combat abilities whatsoever. Nor would he suffer a penalty for the Incompetence flaw, under the influence of a Chaotic World spell or Hyper, or any other third-party modifiers.

So, umm, why did they Errata it? No, don't answer, don't want to get into this argument...

<sighs> Because of the silly assumptions too many people weren't apparently making. Ask any stupid question enough times and they'll surely address it at some point. But whatever. Suppressive fire is maaaaagical. I'll just go with that and keep quiet myself.

You know it's against the forum usage agreement to have more than one handle or alias right?

No. It's against the agreement to use more than one at any given time. I never have, never will, and never do.

I don't think there's anything disallowing changing your account, though. Funkenstein has done it, what, a dozen times? But the moderators haven't said anything.

AROUS: In that case, it would have been much easier to Errata it to read: "Apply only the [...] modifiers from the Ranged Combat Modifiers Table on p. 112 of SR3." For some reason they didn't do that. Take it to mean what ever you want.